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Tuesday, October 31, 2017

Leave No Doubt Leaders focus on people, not power, as
they build and develop their teams. In this period of rapid and disruptive
change to the makeup of the employment base, leaders must focus on empathy and
trust as a means of building genuine “equity”. Leaders who empower others consider
empathy an essential competency to develop high-performance teams. In fact, great
leaders leave no doubt about the
value of their family, friends, colleagues and customers. They invest in
relationships and strive to build high levels of relationship equity through
their actions.

A
true leader will recognize that they must
build their teams through the development of strong relationships, rather
than asserting or trying to demand “power”
or “title”. The old method of the “My way or the highway” style of
management simply doesn't work in business today. As baby boomers retire and
more and more millennials begin their careers, the necessity of building
relationship equity has grown exponentially. The newer, younger work force thrives on more of a relationship-based
leadership style and approach.

This
new generation values a sense of community and a work environment where they
feel valued and cared for by their leaders. In order to create maximum
productivity today, a leader must demonstrate a high level of care towards all
of his or her team members. Do your people know beyond a shadow of doubt that
you genuinely value and trust their input, contributions, and capacity to
impact your organization?

Do
you view the development of trust and relationship equity as mission critical
items of your personal leadership philosophy? Are you committed to investing
the time required to truly get to know your people on a deeper level? When you
know your people and what they value, you have placed yourself in a perfect
position to be able to inspire and lead. The key is you must also be vulnerable
enough to allow them to get to know you in return.

My
past interactions and experiences with leaders from around the globe have led
me to formulate the belief that most leaders don't truly know their people.

Here
were my five questions for leaders:

1.
Do you know your team member’s most important individual dreams?

2.
Do you know your team member’s top three personal goals?

3.
Do you know what one individual has been the most positive center of influence
in your team member’s life?

4.
Do you know your team member’s viewpoint of his or her greatest strength?

5.
Do you know your team member’s personal core values?

Knowing
the answers to these questions is critical in helping you build relationship
equity and trust, which will also help you maximize your leadership ability
with your team members. In order to build real relationship equity, you must
display morally courageous leadership principles. It takes courage to establish
trust and allow your people to move forward without doubt and fear. The morally
courageous leader knows that his or her team members will make mistakes as they
strive to perform. When you leave no
doubt that you will be there to support and encourage them, even through
their mistakes, it sets them free to succeed.

A
leader must invest the time required to truly know his or her team members. A
truism of life is that people will work harder to reach their own goals and
dreams than they will for anything else. When you care enough to find out what
matters most to your team members, only then can you inspire their greatest
efforts and motivate them to achieve higher levels of performance.

About the Author: Paul Cummings’ latest book is called It
All Matters. Paul Cummings has been educating business professionals for
over thirty-five years and has developed revolutionary techniques in sales,
customer service, and leadership development. Enthusiastic. Driven. Intense.
Filled with the desire to not only teach but to also make a lasting
difference, Paul is well-known for teaching his students and clients with
unrivaled zeal and unmatched passion as he enthusiastically lives out his
business motto, changing lives through dynamic instruction. A thirteen-time
winner of the Telly Award and five-time winner of the Communicator Award,
Paul’s ultimate desire is to tangibly and exponentially improve both personal
and professional performance. Paul’s personal mission is to always leave it
better than he found it because he truly understands and firmly believes
that It All
Matters.

Thursday, October 26, 2017

Guest
post by Krissi
Barr:They say you can’t teach an old dog new tricks. That, of course,
is #FakeNews. I know because my 12 year-old dog Yoda just learned how to pull a
coffee cake off the kitchen counter and make the entire thing disappear in
under 10 minutes. The real question is whether a dog can teach new tricks to people.
If by “people” we mean “business leaders” then the answer is a resounding “woof
yes!”Dogs are natural leadership geniuses. This stems from their innate
knowledge of four critical concepts—The Fido Factors—that all great leaders
share: they are faithful, inspirational, determined and observant.Of these, determination is clearly one of the most critical to
business success. And to finagling a pan of breakfast pastry off the kitchen
counter.Good leaders persevere until they get what they want. Great
leaders never quit until their entire team crosses the finish line. In first
place.Life litters our path between the parking lot and our office desk with
obstacles. Our favorite employee quits, a key customer switches to a competitor
or raw material costs skyrocket due to a conflict 6000 miles away.Stuff happens. And when it does it can knock us down. But the most
resilient among us bounce back and keep going. Most importantly they lift up
their entire team and plow ahead.We are often measured by the success we achieve in life. But what
matters most—what really sticks with others—is how we respond to adversity.
Because those who crank up their determination when others throw in their chips
are almost always the ones who win in the long run.Like a big dog with long legs who really wants some coffee cake
that’s just out of reach on the counter, leaders never give up. Ever. If
something is worth going for it’s worth going all the way for.When times get tough, real leaders redouble their effort. And they
find a way to motivate those around them to do the same.Like an extra gear on a sports car, leaders kick it up. It isn’t a
matter of physical strength. It’s all about mental toughness. Like a dog backed
into a corner, it’s fight or flight. And leaders unleash the full measure of
their fight in order to secure victory for the home team.Edison invented over a thousand non-working lightbulbs before he
finally got it right. Most people would have given up after five or 50
failures, and certainly after 500. But that never say never attitude is what
changed his life—and the world—forever.You will face adversity. It could be a difficult customer who says
they will never switch from their current provider. Maybe that’s true. Or maybe
they haven’t experienced the supersized onslaught of your determination to show
them how your solution is better.Yoda said “Do or do not. There is no try.” That’s Yoda from Star
Wars, not Yoda the dog who likes coffee cake. Either way it is true. Redouble your
determination and do. Then watch your leadership quotient zoom.Krissi Barr
is CEO of Barr Corporate
Success, consultants specializing in strategic planning, executive
coaching, and behavioral assessments, and the co-author of The Fido Factor: How to Get a Leg Up at Work.

Thursday, October 19, 2017

I know what you are
thinking - a lemming is a follower and by its very definition, a leader isn’t a
follower. It is absolutely true that within a given group, the leader is
setting the direction and guiding those who follow. But what happens when you
assemble a group of leaders? Perhaps it starts within your organization, then
within your industry? How many “leaders” are present at your college reunion,
your country club, or your annual conference? At some point in your career
journey, have you started to focus more on status as a leader than the job at
hand?

Regardless of our
station in life, there are always others who share similar roles.All of us have a peer group and within that
group a select few are viewed as the role models and the others aspire to reach
that level of peak performance.Said
more simply, some are leaders and the majority are followers.So even the Chief, President, Provost, Chair
or other applicable senior title within your organizational structure are
leaders while at the same time mimicking the practices established by those
they aspire to be.These individuals,
Lemming Leaders, are less focused on adapting best practices to their specific
setting and more concerned with being at the “industry standard”.

Signs of a Lemming
Leader:

Use of jargon:

Do you use the
terms restructuring, high reliability, six sigma, just culture, strategic
sourcing, population health, or employee engagement in your organization? How
about reengineering, total quality management, performance management, learning
organization, value analysis, managed care, or employee satisfaction?

The trappings:

Look in your
driveway.Does your car reflect your
“status”? List your favorite restaurants. Do you bump into employees when you
are there or other executives?

Your friends:

When is the last
time you spoke to a friend from high school? Who would you call in an emergency
if your family was unavailable? Are your social activities limited to work and
business colleagues?

Your bookshelf:

Are they all
leadership books?

The other
employees:

Do they know you? I
mean, do they really know you?

So, if you are a
Lemming, join the club! It is human nature to look towards others who are
successful in a similar position and try to emulate them. The problem rests
however in how this pre-occupation with being acknowledged as a “leader” by
your peers is perceived by your employees. This job you are in isn’t about
enhancing your standing relative to others, but is about enhancing your
organizations’ performance in the market, which can only be achieved through
the combined efforts of your entire team.

To break away from
the lemmings, give these techniques a try:

1. Use plain
language to describe what you are trying to accomplish. If you are trying
to make your operation more efficient, then say so. “To continue to have our
product priced competitively so we can increase sales, we need to reduce our
costs. To do that, we are going to identify any work effort that doesn’t make
our product better and eliminate it.”
Sounds a lot clearer than saying “we are going to embark on a six sigma project
to improve efficiency,” doesn’t it?

2. Encourage the
customization of best practices in your organization.Learning from others is appropriate, copying
is not!

3. You should be
able to enjoy your life and the economic rewards that you have earned. Just be
sure that what you want is the driving force, not what looks best. My most
recent peer review included a comment that I needed to get a better car. I
drive a Fiat 500. I worked hard to earn a salary that allowed me the discretion
to buy what I love, not just what I can afford. I love my Fiat, whether it fits
my role in the company or not!

4. This one is
IMPORTANT: When the time comes for your career to end, and it will one way or
the other, your friends and family are the ones who will still be there. If you
have those kinds of people in your life, treasure them. If not, find some who
don’t know and don’t care what you do for a living.

5. Remember back in
your undergraduate liberal arts classes when you had to read the classics? That
was when you learned to think for yourself. Keep reading the leadership books
if you must, but branch out a bit. Read a novel. Study history. Write a poem.
Think beyond what other leaders have discovered, discover on your own.

6. Be open with
your staff; share who you are and what you care about. Be fair, not
frightening.

As my career
progressed and I got drawn into a “lemming leadership” identify, my mother
would quite bluntly point out that the higher one climbs, the harder the fall.
She reminded me that I am privileged to have a great job, but it does not
define who I am.

Know who you are
and be yourself first and lead from there. When it comes time to hand off the
job to the next rising star, you will still have your feet on the ground to
break the fall.

The
Owl Approach to Storytelling: Lead with Your Life, the first book from Sandy Coletta, is available
now. Originally published in early 2017, The Owl Approach combines
a how-to guide for leadership storytelling with examples of actual stories
shared with Coletta's staff at Kent Hospital in Warwick, RI during her
tenure as President. The book offers insight into when to use personal
stories, where to "discover" those stories and why the moral
matters.

Tuesday, October 17, 2017

If we want our teams to follow us willingly, they first
need to trust us. To gain trust, we have to learn to connect with people in a
meaningful way. People want to be seen and heard. They want to know that we
will be there for them if they need us.

Meaningful connection is not necessarily a natural
talent that comes easily. Connecting with others requires that we get to know individual
team members as people, not simply employees.

Here are three ways to build trust:

1)Good Listening

Good listening involves offering our full attention to
the people speaking. Learning to do this is a practice that is even more
important—and more challenging—in our distracted, digital age. We cannot offer our full attention to others
when we are checking our emails, responding to texts, or reading our notebooks.

The key difference between good listening—the kind
that builds trust—and distracted listening is that good listening requires us
to look the person in the eye. When we listen well, we look the person speaking
in the eye and do our very best not to turn our gaze away.

A second aspect of good listening is the continued
practice of turning your mind back to the person speaking, even as the mind tries
over and over again to think about yet another item on your to-do list.
Focusing on the color of the speaker’s eyes is a good trigger to help move your
concentration toward the person speaking and away from whatever is distracting
you at the moment.

If it feels almost impossible to keep your mind on the
person speaking, you won’t be able to build trust. If you know you have a
frenzied mind, plan a different time to talk with the person—or learn how to
center yourself. If you can learn how to center your mind before meetings, it
will go a long way toward ensuring that you are in a better mental state to
listen well and build trust. There are many methods to do this, such as
mindfulness or breathing practices.

Finally, to really listen well, you need to actually listen. This means you are not offering
solutions or interrupting, but listening to what the other person has to say
without trying to form your own response yet. Giving the individual the time to
speak while you are listening attentively will help them to feel valued and
build trust.

2)Allow the Team
to Co-create Guidelines

Where possible, allow the team to co-create the ways
they work together and how the work gets done. Most people do not want to be
told what to do and appreciate being part of the decision-making process. Having
a team create certain guidelines, procedures, and communication protocols is
one way to foster a cohesive team and build trust. There’s an automatic level
of buy-in and support when the marching orders are co-created.

When contemplating communication protocols, consider
the meaning of the principle of integrity or truthfulness. Trust is built when
communications are open and honest and there are no hidden agendas. Work toward
being as open as possible with your team. Embed openness into your
communication guidelines.

Allow for questioning and healthy discourse. This
creates clarity for ourselves and for our teams. A healthy level of discourse
just might result in a better way, so be flexible to adjusting guidelines as
well.

3)Fostering Safe and Supportive Work Environments

People want to feel safe, secure, and supported, in
life and at work. Foster an environment that builds trust by practicing being
vulnerable, which is a deep human quality that supports relationship building.
Our team needs to see our own human side, including our imperfections. When we
share our frustrations, our fears, and our failures, we in turn send a signal
to our team that we are willing to be open, so they can feel safe being open,
too. This is a great way to create a safe environment.

When we foster a strong team connection, we build
trust across the team. By communicating in ways that are uniting and not
dividing, we fortify the team. Demonstrate how every function has meaningful
importance to the productivity of the team and success of the organization.
Make the team aware of what the others on the team do and the challenges they
encounter. Be generous with compliments on work well done and share accolades
openly. Encourage team members to support one another in this way as well.

Trust and followership are built on simple practices that
we can do to connect more deeply with our teams. Implement these practices and
watch team satisfaction improve and your days become a little easier.

Tarra Mitchell, author of The Yoga of Leadership
(Fall 2017),is
integrating her distinctive background in business and yoga to show how
personal wellbeing is connected to success. Her keen ability to connect with
people led to an investment career directing billion-dollar fundraising events
and developing relationships around the world. @TarraMMitchell

Thursday, October 12, 2017

What
would your organization be like if every employee had a great manager? What
would happen to productivity, quality, morale and customer satisfaction? In
every organization, managers are a key leverage point to drive higher
performance and better business results. Managers maintain service and quality
standards and ensure adherence to company policies and regulatory requirements.
They also drive engagement and retention of employees.

Managers
influence at least 75 percent of the reasons people give for voluntary job turnover, and they account for 70
percent of variance in employee engagement. The impact managers have on turnover and
engagement go straight to the organization’s bottom line. Turnover costs range
from 48 to 61 percent of an employee’s annual salary, and disengaged employees
cost organizations $3,400 for every $10,000 in salary.

It’s
difficult to overstate the impact a great manager can have on organizational
performance. However, organizations often under invest in their selection and
training. In fact, in many organizations, the best front line employee (e.g. best
nurse, best waiter, best carpenter) is promoted as the next manager.
Furthermore, in many cases, the new manager receives zerotraining. One day
the person is an hourly employee, and the next day they’re managing their
former coworkers. Sound familiar?

Improving
the process for identifying and training new managers presents a low-risk, high
return, strategic opportunity to improve organizational performance. Here are
specific steps you can take to make managers a strategic business
priority.

First, change your selection criteria.

Optimizing
the impact of managers starts with changing your selection criteria. Performing
with excellence as a manager requires very different talents than performing in
an hourly employee role. Therefore, excellent individual performance is not a
good basis for promoting someone to a management role. Instead, look for an
employee who naturally exhibits these behaviors and attitudes.

1. Takes
Initiative. This particular combination of behavior
and attitude is fundamental to everything else and should be a ticket to
admission for promotion to manager. Who sees ways to help, to improve things,
to add value -- and takes action?

2.
Improves Morale. This should also be required. Who has a strong positive attitude and positively impacts the attitudes of
others? Things feel better in the department when this person is working. He or
she encourages others to maintain positivity and optimism in the face of
adversity.

3.
Helps Other Employees. Who
notices when another team member could use some help and just spontaneously
moves in to help them? This person might
reach out proactively to help you as well.

4.
Teaches Other Employees. Who
naturally shares knowledge, expertise and new learning to help other people do
their jobs better – and really enjoys that kind of teaching?

5.
Generates Ideas For Improvement. Who always sees ways to make things function more
effectively -- and then speaks up? This might be annoying sometimes, but it’s a
sign of management talent.

6.
Demonstrates Leadership. Who
sees that something needs to be done, asks others to pitch in and gets results? This goes beyond simply
taking initiative. The key is in asking
othersand getting them to pitch in.
Again, it’s natural.

While not an exhaustive
list, it’s a great start to finding people with the natural talent to be
managers. And it’s much better than just choosing the top performer in the
current role. In fact, your best management candidate might NOT be the best
performer in the department. The person with the highest potential to be a great
supervisor or manager might be just average as a waiter or sales associate. If
you see these attitudes and behaviors, if you see an employee who does these
kinds of things without being asked … that’s the person you should
consider for promotion to manager.

Next,
provide appropriate training.

The
next step in making sure every employee has a great manager is to create a
training program. Once you have identified future managers, put them into a
training program. You and your colleagues should make a list of the skills and
knowledge needed to be a great manager in your organization. Possible items
might include:

Union contracts

Wage and hour law

Scheduling work

Inventory

Company and departmental policies

Coaching and counseling

Ordering supplies

Train the trainer

Whatever is on your
list, new managers will operate with a much higher level of confidence when you
train them beforehand, rather than just saying, “Congratulations, here’s your
desk.” By the way, how much easier would your
life be if every employee had a great manager?

Final step: Hold managers accountable.

Most
companies are keenly aware of the importance of employee engagement. Many
conduct periodic engagement surveys, form teams to address issues identified by
those surveys and implement improvement strategies recommended by those teams.
That is a costly, time-consuming process. And despite those kinds of efforts,
engagement survey scores do not seem to improve materially year over year.

There is a better way to improve your
engagement scores. Focus on your managers.

If
you analyze data on engagement and voluntary turnover, you are likely see the
Pareto Principle in action – 80% of your low engagement or high turnover is
attributable to 20% of your managers.

The
solution is to remove the poor managers and replace them with great managers.
This solution is not easy or pleasant. It might require you to alter
performance evaluation criteria to hold managers accountable for engagement
scores and voluntary turnover. It might require you to replace some managers
withseniority. The alternative is to ignore
the reality that certain poor managers are causing most of the disengagement
and voluntary turnover. Replacing them with great managers will improve all
your metrics, and improve them rapidly.

Conclusion

Focusing
on managers presents a low-risk, high return, strategic opportunity to improve
organizational performance. You can do this by adopting better selection
criteria and by providing better training. Parting company with poor managers
and replacing them with highly talented managers will bring rapid improvement
in engagement and turnover, translating to better financial results.